The Best Laid Plans

Are you one of those people where things you plan, never turn out quite the way you imagined them? Well, I am.

Take for example a simple canoe trip I planned down the Hillsborough River in Tampa. My friend told me how beautiful it was and since I love the tranquility of canoeing, I reserved a canoe.

As I pulled up to the ramshackle lean to that housed the canoe rental place, I was reminded of the canoe trips I used to take back when I was a student and I couldn't wait until I was on the water again, paddling downstream.

On the other hand, my canoeing partner was there only because I asked him to be. He didn't care for the water, hated the outdoors, and if the truth be told, couldn't swim.

"No problem", said the canoe guy who was shoving us into the water in the middle of a swamp. "You're going to want to stay in the canoe anyway."

"Why's that?", I asked naively.

"It's alligator mating season, ma'am. Gators are everywhere. Shouldn't be a problem if you stay in your canoe", said he.

Stay in my canoe. Stay in my canoe. It was like a mantra as we floated down the river. Hard to relax when at every turn, there were alligators sunning themselves on logs, laying in the shallows and swimming in the river. They looked a bit like tires in the water as all you could see were their eyes as they paddled silently.

Now for this Chicago girl, being this close up to alligators that weren't in a cage, seemed a bit insane. After all, this was no Disney ride where if something went wrong, a man in a park ranger uniform was going to be there to "stop the ride" and let you get off. Nope. This was real life. A 3 hour survival course and we were soon to be put to the test.

Around the next corner was a submerged log and within minutes we were somehow stuck on top of it. On the shore around us, alligators were sunning themselves but keeping one eye on us as well. Funny that there were no other canoers on this day. Maybe they knew something we didn't.

My canoeing partner thought the best way to get off the log was to rock the canoe. A word of advice? That is never the right thing to do and within a nano second we were in the water eyeball to eyeball with the alligators.

My biggest issue wasn't my fear of losing a limb (although it was right up there)- no it was that my friend had fallen out of the canoe, and had sunk to the bottom of the river like a stone. In seconds, he came up from the bottom shrieking like a baby and then sank again and I was trying to calm down the situation lest the alligators thought there was something (or someone as the case may be) in distress and come over to investigate.

Let's stop here to review. We are 20 minutes into a 3 hour canoe trip, have lost all of our belongings (including the canoe and almost my friend) in the river and alligators are everywhere. I kept wondering where was the fun in all of this?

And it wasn't until we beached our canoe at the end of the trip (yes we were able to get the canoe, empty it of water, and start anew all without adverse alligator intervention) and stumbled toward the canoe rental guy that I realized the absurdity of it all.

He took one look at us and said, "Go into the water, did ya?"

I caught a glimpse of myself in his sunglasses- makeup streaked all over my face, sunburned arms (we lost the sunscreen in the river), hair sticking up all over, river dirt on my legs and I started to laugh.

"Yeah. We went into the water."

But what he didn't know, was that I was thinking about the more important thing. The thing that had me laughing in relief. The thing I still think about today, every time I step into a canoe.

What is that, you ask? Simple. It wasn't that we went into the water. No. It was that we came out of the water. Now that was the big thing of the day!